Good class, good professor, challenging exams.

The exams are nothing like the homework, and in my opinion, they do not accurately reflect learning—they measure how good you are at solving a problem you've never seen before (using what you've learned). As an analogy, the homework and lectures are like high school physics, everything is in the textbook; while the exams are like physics olympiads, you've never seen this before and it'll likely take creativity to solve it. I can somewhat sympathize with this method of administering exams—I suppose I'm spoiled by being spoonfed by high school and textbook problems. I wish Dr. Kavehpour would direct us to resources that more accurately reflect the challenges on the exams.

DISCLAIMER: This was online during COVID-19

Professor Kavehpour is one of the best professors I have had. This was online, and he made it feel much more personal than you would get in an in person lecture hall. He took advantage of online learning better than any other professor I had this quarter. He made us feel welcome and taught us everything we needed to know. He made jokes that helped to ease stress about the environment. His grading scheme was a bit tough (25% each midterm, 50% for the final) but his exams were very fair and short enough that they weren't a pain to try to do. REMEMBER COORDINATE SYSTEMS AND CONTROL VOLUMES ON THE EXAMS because some people didn't despite his warnings and they received lower scores because of it. This class was very fun in the online format, and in person I assume its the same. He's a very personable guy. 10/10 would take this class again even if it was in person

he's a nice guy and pretty good at explaining topics.

Prefacing this review by saying that I'm not an engineering major, so imposter syndrome was often times very real. Thankfully, all turned out okay, but this class was definitely one of the more difficult ones for me. A lot of times I felt like I was scribbling down random hieroglyphs and didn't know how to decode them, or whether they were derivations or the final formulas.

Most of the details of this class have already been said: theory/derivation-heavy lectures, no graded homework, fair exams. Pictures aren't always provided, so you should also practice how to derive a diagram from any given word problem to be ready for exams. And like others have said, assumptions, control volumes, normal vectors, force arrows, and axes are all super important, because as Dr. Kavehpour says, your work and formulas mean nothing if they're not there in the image. Not sure if this is an MIT thing specifically to be stickler on these, because I remember watching a lot of MIT mechanics lectures where they were very specific on coordinate systems, and Dr. Kavehpour also went to MIT, but just a speculation. And for assumptions, don't just vomit them all out, and actually know which ones apply (particularly for Bernoulli's equation).

I'm quite intrigued by the the ancient reviews that complain about Dr. Kavehpour's theoretical approach to lecture, because pretty much all of my lower div. math and physics professors have taken this approach, and it has been up to the student and discussions to get practice problem experience. So hopefully by now you should know what resources to access (book, office hours, email) to tackle that part of the class. In fact, Dr. Kavehpour even did some practice problems before the midterms, which was immensely helpful.

Homework is not graded, and discussion is optional, but you truly cannot survive this class without the problem-solving practice that both give you, so please please do yourself a favor and do the homework and go to discussion (so that you don't have to spend 2 hours sometime later watching the recording and fall behind). Dr. Kavehpour even mentioned that the end goal (which you should hopefully know by now in these physical science classes) is to become familiar with the problem-solving approaches/strategies of this class, so that you can overcome the "hump" of not knowing what to do/being stuck when you look at problems. And you really can't do that without practice. I'd say that for the exam, a lot of the strategies were covered in homework or discussion, and some of the scenarios were framed quite similar to some of the homework questions, so again, don't skip them.

Exams are 24 hours, which can be a blessing and a curse, especially since midterms only have 2 questions. They're supposed to take you 2 hours, but if you overthink things or don't know something and refuse to give up, then they can eat up your time. A 10ish minute video is required, where you explain your problem-solving process, which wasn't bad, and it was intended to help you realize what you're doing.

Lastly, the content of this course is a little bit different from lectures you might find on youtube, particularly the CPP ones, as Dr. Kavehpour goes into a lot of detail on Reynolds Transport Theorem, pipe flow, and compressible flow, but kinda glosses over the navier-stokes equations. The topics towards the end make up about 50% of the final, and they have a formulaic process to solve the questions, which is why I feel like things turned out okay. But just keep in mind that what will be assessed might not be the hardest of what fluid mechanics has to offer, so definitely immerse yourself the learning process and be an active learner in this class to truly get the most out of it.

Kavehpour was a good teacher overall, although there may exist start-of-quarter heckling rituals when classes are in person again. He's tried out this quarter and last making homework non-graded, which I capitalized on by not doing it. Was still able to do well, but that's probably bad advice - do your homework! His lectures are mainly derivations, interesting but not really necessary, then discussions/"recitations" are where problems are solved. Sometimes there could be a weird mismatch between material covered in lecture and in discussions. For TAs, I liked Sahar's explanations of individual problems better and Ryan's discussion of general concepts (/emphasis on what to do for tests), although they both cover the same sets of practice problems generally. Both were very good. There were 2 midterms and a final, the midterms were quite easy as long as you knew how to apply the equations (and TA Ryan's emphasis on moving CV conservation equations helped here). The final was harder but it was fun, and made easier by the ubiquitous 24h rona finals. I imagine it would be quite stressful in person with 2 or 3h. Overall a good class and possible to do well if you know the material.

Lectures were very theory-driven, so it felt a bit overwhelming to follow at times. Although the lectures were not equivalent to the content on exams, I would still go just to gain exposure and some background on the topics. It is more beneficial to attend discussions since both TAs worked through problems to help practice for the exams. Exams seemed fair, and Kavehpour was even nice enough to do a few practice problems before each test. To score maximum points on the exams make sure to be overly thorough with explaining how you are solving the problems (i.e. noting the assumptions you need to make to use an equation). But you will be coached on these expectations in class and discussion, so it should not come as a surprise. Overall, the 24 hour exams immensely reduced stress, and I still feel like I learned A LOT in the course.

This was a difficult class. Professor Kavehpour is a decent lecturer and a nice guy. However, his lectures could be confusing on occasion, as he spends a lot of time going through derivations and complicated math which is hard to follow, so I didn't really learn much from watching lectures. I'd recommend watching discussions to see how to solve problems. Homework wasn't compulsory, so the workload was pretty light and you could just cram everything in the week before an exam and you should be fine.

Kavehpour is an awesome guy teaching a decently hard class. He doesn't curve but he subjectively grades you based on your midterms and final. If you get above 90% on the final you get an automatic A which saved me. I got 100% on the first midterm and 35% on the second but Kavehpour values improvement and actually learning so the final is really important to show that you can learn from prior mistakes.

The textbook is really important so make sure you have it. PDF of the textbook works fine. There are a lot of tables and charts you need from the textbook to solve problems.

Lectures are engaging, clear, understandable, and he usually finishes early which is nice. Discussion is really important too and Diederik(TA) was really good at getting the most important stuff from lectures for you to know. Last lecture is Kavehpour talking about the reality of careers in engineering. It is tough to listen to but very informative about the paths you can take to advance your career.

My favorite professor so far at UCLA. The only reason I started writing BruinWalk reviews is because of him.

Dropping this here since he has two profiles for some reason:

Cool guy. He doesn't allow cell phones, which I think is good since now you're forced to pay attention and the material is pretty interesting. He starts lecture ten minutes late (on purpose) and usually ends ten or so minutes early (if we have a break about 50 minutes in; if there's no break then we would end 20 or so minutes early).

The two midterms were pretty straightforward and graded very fairly in my opinion. The first one was open book and notes (he allowed digital textbooks aka laptop or iPad but no phones), but he changed that for the second one since the class got really crowded and cluttered and it was hard to proctor. We were only allowed a formula sheet (front and back) for the second midterm. I'm not sure if he'll keep implementing the open book and notes policy, I think it depends on the class size and number of students (and in the end it's all up to him). The questions on the midterms were a little more difficult than the homework problems, but not really by that much. He provides typed-up solutions to every homework assignment so each solution is easy to follow and understand.

Because of the coronavirus situation, he gave us a take-home final that we had 12 hours to complete (8am-8pm). This meant it was open book, note, computer, everything (except the obvious: don't work with other people; not something he could monitor but I hope people had some integrity and didn't do this). I'm not sure if he made the final harder due to the whole weird situation but I thought it was pretty tough.

Overall I thought he was a good professor.

he's cool! very funny and starts class at 10 after the official start time. he was super clear the whole quarter but rushes the last section so make sure you're prepared for that.